I’m not very good at naming things. I agonize over headlines and story titles, anything that must be told quickly and completely.
I love words, you see. They tell pictures…
Even giving title to a painting challenges me — I guess because I want the viewer to relate visually and emotionally and create their own stories. Wordy [...]
My best people paintings come from photos that suggest a story to me. Nothing spectacular. Usually not posed, and with no special lighting. Even photos taken on a grey day with little color can tell a story so poignant it begs to be painted.
I found such a photo two years ago among my daughter’s snap [...]
by Barbara Hartsook on September 22, 2008 · 10 comments
As a little girl, a favorite chore of mine was erasing and washing the chalkboards at the end of each school week. With a big bucket of cold water and a fat sponge, I could wash away all the math problems, diagrammed sentences, drawn-out music scores, lists of spelling words… On Fridays the green slate [...]
by Barbara Hartsook on September 13, 2008 · 9 comments
One teacher, the kind of teacher we hope our kids and their kids can have at least once in their classrooms, writes a blog called Teacher Time.
She paints such wonderful stories with her words, her poetry. Stories that move in the mind. Like paintings that trigger a memory, we can say Yes! I’ve been there! [...]
by Barbara Hartsook on September 10, 2008 · 7 comments
Seems like August never happened. I know it must have — I had a birthday.
At the end of July I collected a blue ribbon and my paintings that didn’t sell from one art show, and hustled them to another town a few miles east of me for a month-long exhibit. In September I moved the [...]
